What does it take to fill your calendar with clients?

It was New Year’s Eve day, 2013, and I had an appointment at a Scottsdale hair salon. Mind you it was actually the last day of the year, I imagined it might be significantly busier for the big last night of the year. As I got to the salon and no one else was there, I was wondering aren’t most people having their hair done with a super up do or a blow out. Perhaps not. I personally, just needed to get my hair cut and colored, a long overdue visit. Thank goodness to Instant Barter, I found the option for an alternative beauty and hair salon to check out without needing to dip into my personal cash.

Seeing that the salon was kind of quiet, being an analytical business person, I was strategizing with my new friend and shop owner, Yvonne, about her business. She’s been working on hair a long time and this girl is absolutely talented. I had to wonder though why she was there by herself on what i would have believed would be a highly lucrative day. The answer was she was undertaking all the tasks, clients, and maintenance of the shop completely on her own. Have you ever been there, doing everything by yourself, thinking you can manage it all?

All that I could suppose in reaction was simply, Yvonne will need to hire another person. Do what you do best and delegate the rest! Hire someone to come in and clean the shop, organize the shop, and beautifully merchandise products. I encouraged Yvonne to create the space to focus on what she loved — hair!

Being the bright business woman, Yvonne jumped on it and started looking for help. Our conversation, had not been news to her, she knew what to do, she just had not made the effort at this stage to get it done.

Today, I was going to be back in her shop for a long overdue appointment. It actually took a couple of weeks to get it worked on both of our now busy calendars. She looked great! Yvonne looked refreshed and happier. She boasted about how she had been up since 5:30 am and had taken a workout at the gym!

The most interesting component is the fact that I arrived early for my scheduled appointment, no surprise there, I’m often early. But the interesting thing was that Yvonne now needed to juggle me with another client. What was different is she now had “Shannon” to wash my hair and get me started with a blow dry. How cool is that, Yvonne hired someone and was effortlessly delegating part of the task with my appointment to a helper. I was so delighted for Yvonne simply because not only did she take action to be more efficient, but she managed it like a pro. Virtually anyone observing might have thought she’d been operating the shop for a very long time by doing this. By the way, it happened to be a packed shop when I left. Imagine that change, a Wednesday morning in April, no special occasion.

I made certain that I reserved my next appointment before I walked out the door. An entrepreneur with that sort of natural talent (you can see how great my hair looks in the picture), as well as business savvy is sure to be sought-after and filling up her calendar for weeks in advance.

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